How stupid do they think people are?

The dumbest thing about the Rove Defense so far is this idea that Rove and Cooper were chatting about welfare reform on Friday, July 11 two years ago, just before Karl went on holidays.
Such a hot topic, welfare reform, wasn't it?
And then, supposedly, the subject of Joe Wilson just happened to come up, just casual-like, right at the end of the call.
Bullsh*t.
The Wilson op ed had appeared FIVE DAYS BEFORE in the New York Times, causing Bush and Rice to spend EVERY DAY SINCE stuck with an hysterical press corps in Africa screaming about yellowcake and Iraq, while Bush and Cheney and Rice were frantically spinning the "it was just 16 words" meme and supposedly trying to track down the error, culminating in Tennant falling on his sword about the State of the Union error later that very same evening.
And Cooper and Rove were supposedly just chatting about welfare reform? Well, maybe Cooper didn't care about the hottest news story on the planet, but Rove sure did.

UUAT

Over at MyDD, there's a post linking Rove to Watergate as well as 'Leakgate' -- interesting stuff.
But while reading the comments to this article, I also found out this little known (or, at least, unknown to me) fact about Rove -- that he dropped out of the University of Utah in 1971. It started me wondering -- why would he do that?
Maybe its now time to start the University of Utah Alumni for Truth (UUAT).
So Rove just "dropped out" of the University of Utah in 1971? Perhaps a check with his fellow students and professors is in order to see if, really perhaps, he may have been booted out for cheating.
Now of course, I am not making ANY accusations whatsoever, just that someone really should discuss this on a few talk shows, now that this serious question has been raised.
And why, once he left university, was he not drafted and sent to Vietnam? Did Nixon personally issue a special deferrment? Or did Rove tell the draft board that he was gay? And was this the truth, or did he just lie to get out of serving in the military?
Once again, of course, I am not making ANY accusations whatsoever, just asking.
But of course, now that these serious questions have been raised, well, once again they must all be discussed in detail on the talk shows. The UUAT should demand definitive and documented answers to these serious questions! The UUAT wants Rove to release ALL of his medical and university and selective service records, so that the UUAT can see for itself what the truth really is!

"Oops! My bad"

Saying 'sorry', 'oops'. and 'my bad', just doesn't cut it.
This is why Canada doesn't have a death penalty and will never have one again: Convicted, Executed, Not Guilty
And also, of course, David Millgard, Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall . . .

My helpful nature

Gee, I must be well known around the world for my helpful nature, my generous personality, my intuitive warmth and graciousness.
I just got ANOTHER opportunity to help someone in Africa or somewhere, by allowing them to deposit $16 million in my bank account.
Thanks, guys. Its so nice to be famous.

Bolton? Who's that?

White House urges another vote on Bolton
Yes, I'll bet they'd be thrilled right about now if there was some more controversy about Bolton, to the point that he would dominate the front pages again, instead of all the stories about Rove and Iraq and WMD and all that -- ah, the good old days of a month ago, when it was all Bolton, all the time.

Liars

OK, I'll just quote the whole Poorman post:

Larry “Grandmama” Johnson: "At the end of the day, Joe Wilson was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was the Bush Administration that pushed that lie and because of that lie Americans are dying. Shame on those who continue to slander Joe Wilson while giving Bush and his pack of liars a pass. That’s the true outrage."
Furreal. And it’s not like there’s all these otherwise decent people out there who just kinda happened to fall on the wrong side of the fence on this particular issue. In fact, I’d say that there is a pretty strong correlation between engaging in one of the following activities and engaging in the other two:
1. Smearing Joseph Wilson and pooh-pooh’ing (or cheering) the well-documented and now admitted burning of a CIA operative.
2. Condoning, excusing, downplaying, and/or ignoring the extensive use of torture under the Bush Administration, while smearing anyone who actually opposes it.
3. Passing along every half-assed rumor about how Saddam and Osama were best friends and had this huge underground a-bomb factory together, and smearing and slandering anyone who questions any of this Administration’s destructive nonsense.
If you are one of these people, you can basically just shut the fuck up forever, starting now. I don’t care if you are ashamed of yourself, I don’t give half a fuck about you either way, I just want to make sure that your bullshit is never listened to ever again. Enough already.

Morality, anyone? Don't any of these people go to church?

Intentional is as intentional does

Hmmm . . .
OK, one more point on the Rove thing, and then I'll quit.
The US law is described as saying no one can “intentionally disclose[] any information identifying [a] covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information”.
Now, the common interpretation of the word "intentional" in the Rove story so far has been in the sense of "intended to reveal a secret" -- in other words, only if Rove knew Plame was covert and told Novak anyway could the leak be described as "intentional". This is certainly the spin that Rove's lawyer is using.
But suppose the word "intentional" in a legal sense means only "not accidental" -- in other words, because Rove knew he was speaking to a reporter, anything he said was "intentional" regardless of what he knew or why he said it. In that sense, a "non-intentional" leak would have been if Rove was talking about Plame to the head of the CIA on the phone, and Novak had sneaked up to his office door to overhear the phone call.
Hmmm . . .

Unfit

Juan Cole provides a concise summary of the whole Rove issue: Rove Unfit for Public Office: "Whether the courts can and will punish Karl Rove for telling Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA operative should be beside the point. That's for the courts to decide. The real question is whether we want a person to occupy a high office in the White House when that person has cynically endangered US national security to take a petty sort of revenge on a whistleblower." Read it all.

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone

The tune is now in my head:

Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone
Let's pretend that we're together all alone.
I'll tell the man to turn the jukebox way down low.
And you can tell your friend there with you, he'll have to go.

Why? Well, it seems like there's a history of 'sweet lips' between Rove and Novak. From MyDD comes this link -- Karl Rove and Novak: They've Talked Before "Karl Rove was fired from the 1992 re-election campaign of Bush Sr. for allegedly leaking a negative story about Bush loyalist/fundraiser Robert Mosbacher to Novak. Novak's piece described a meeting organized by then-Senator Phil Gramm at which Mosbacher was relieved of his duties as state campaign manager because "the president's re-election effort in Texas has been a bust." Rove was fired after Mosbacher fingered him as Novak's source."

Oh, for crying out loud

We won. You lost. Stop grandstanding.
Anti-same-sex group lobbies Queen: " The former television host of 100 Huntley Street is leading a group urging Queen Elizabeth to step in and block Parliament from passing same-sex marriage legislation."

Maybe this time

Some in the blogosphere, having been burned many times before, are concluding that unless Rove is actually charged with obstruction or perjury or criminally outing a CIA agent, he's going to be staying in the White House. All that stuff from Bush two years ago about how the leaker would be fired were just the usual BS, they're saying, and the Republicans are going to try to make everything Joe Wilson's fault. Here's The Poorman's Ships post:

. . . it is important to appreciate that there is a vast, vast ocean of difference between picking on some NY Times reporter and actually, you know, doing things which will make the White House upset. The right-wing smear machine hasn't tried to tear Fitzgerald down, the Justice Department and/or Congress hasn't taken away his funding, and Tom DeLay hasn't yet darkly warned any activist judges or jurists who might sit on such criminal cases as may result from this investigation that he cannot be responsible for the potentially violent actions of patriotic citizens which may understandably result from any anti-American type of outcome. It's not impossible that we could see justice come out of this thing, and perhaps even the long-awaited frogmarch, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Too many people just want to see this story sail away.

But I wonder if it will actually be so easy -- are people in the United States finally getting fed up? According to Americablog, a lot of newspaper editorial pages this morning were on this story. John writes:

. . . the coverage is bad. Real bad. I'm going to post the leads of the stories, to give you a sense of how bad.
NYT (via SF Chronicle): Nearly two years after stating that any administration official found to have been involved in leaking the name of an undercover CIA officer would be fired, and assuring that Karl Rove and other senior aides to President Bush had nothing to do with the disclosure, the White House refused on Monday to answer any questions about new evidence of Rove's role in the matter.
Detroit Free Press: The White House refused Monday to repeat earlier assertions that any administration official who leaked classified information would be fired. The refusal comes days after Karl Rove, one of President George W. Bush's top aides, was revealed as the source of a news leak that exposed a CIA undercover officer in 2003.

Houston Chronicle: The White House scrambled Monday to reconcile President Bush's vow to fire anyone who leaked information about an undercover CIA operative with revelations that top political aide Karl Rove spoke to a reporter about the agent.
AP: The White House is suddenly facing damaging evidence that it misled the public by insisting for two years that presidential adviser Karl Rove wasn't involved in leaking the identity of a femaleCIA officer.
SF Chronicle editorial: THE OFFICIAL silence from the White House on Monday was quite disturbing.
Robert Scheer: To try to conceal the fact that the president had lied to the American public about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, Rove attempted to destroy the credibility of two national security veterans and send an intimidating message to any other government officials preparing to publicly tell the truth.

Josh Marshall points out the latest Republican "Red Herring Egregious Mumbojumbo", debunking that Wilson's trip to Niger had been authorized by Tennant or Cheney -- the egregious aspect being that Wilson neither said nor implied that his trip had been authorized by Tennant or Cheney. Marshall writes "The whole thing is a dodge and a distraction. It's irrelevant to the question that was under discussion. It's just yet another attempt to whip up a phoney cover story after the fact. Or, in other words, more scofflaw Republicanism."
It seems the Republican attack machine will be trying to recycle the same points it tried to make last summer, that a Senate Intelligence report had debunked Wilson -- which is not true at all. And with no WDM found in Iraq, and Tennant saying two years ago that the Africa claim should not have been made, I wonder how many would now be persuaded that Wilson was wrong about Niger.
Armando notes that the story has now developed some of its own momentum, moving away from Wilson to focus on Rove and Bush " . . . the White House lied to the American People about the fact that Rove leaked that Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. That's the story now. The law will take care of itself. The Plame prosecutor will tell us about that if and when he hands down indictments. But the White House has been lying to the American People about the fact that Rove leaked Plame's identity and about the fact that the President would fire whoever leaked this information."

Here's the Rove spin

Watch for these themes to be developed over the next few days. This is from Power Line

The media feeding frenzy will, indeed, be massive. But absent a serious claim of a statutory violation or perjury, it's questionable whether anyone apart from liberal bloggers and other pre-existing Bush haters will partake in the media's dog food. This isn't a top presidential aide accepting an expensive gift, or engaging in lewd sexual conduct. It's a top aide providing truthful information to journalists in response to lies told to embarrass the administration and our government. And . . . Valerie Plame isn't very convincing as a covert agent of the United States, although she did fairly well as an agent of her husband and the president's other enemies.

Emphasis mine. So here is the spin to look for over the next few days: the only thing loyal Karl Rove did was to tell reporters the truth about that liar Wilson and his sleazy wife, who Rove didn't know was undercover so he didn't break any law.
So what us liberal bloggers need is our own spin. The truth isn't going to be enough -- it never is these days.
And here is that spin:
Instead of dealing honestly with the American people about Iraq, the president's top aides once again tried to kill the messenger by attacking Joe Wilson's personal credibility. And they are just so incompetent that they outed an undercover CIA agent by mistake.
UPDATE: Digby says just about the same thing as I did, above, but he said it first

The 'What, Me Worry?" Kid

They just cannot stand to be laughed at. Yahoo News reports:
Republicans Blast Sen. Clinton's Comments Well, its about time the Democrats said something about the fumblebums running the US now.
Republicans spend five months last year doing what they described as 'poking fun'at Kerry and the Democrats - remember the bandaids and the flip-flop sandals and on and on -- and just a few weeks ago, Rove continued the attack by smearing liberals and democrats as unpatriotic wimps. And Howard Dean, previously the only Democrat who was on the offensive with the Republicans, is derided as a screamer every time he opens his mouth.
So now the Democrats are just 'poking a little gentle fun' at Bush.
"I sometimes feel that Alfred E. Neuman is in charge in Washington" . . . [Senator Clinton]drew a laugh from the crowd when she described Bush's attitude toward tough issues with Neuman's catch phrase: "What, me worry?"
And the sign that it is working is how pissed off the Republicans are.

Depends on what the meaning of "covert" is

Rove told reporter about Plame's role at CIA: "White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove spoke with at least one reporter about Valerie Plame's role at the CIA before she was identified as a covert agent in a newspaper column two years ago, but Rove's lawyer said yesterday that his client did not identify her by name . . . To be considered a violation of the law, a disclosure by a government official must have been deliberate, the person doing it must have known that the CIA officer was a covert agent, and he or she must have known that the government was actively concealing the covert agent's identity."
Now, I wonder how in the world the president's assistant know that Joe Wilson's wife was an agent for the CIA. Maybe some of those NSA intercepts? However, this article doesn't ask that uncomfortable question. Indeed, the whole article seems designed to imply that Rove didn't actually reveal Plame at all, even though he talked to reporters about her. Rove just called her "Joe Wilson's wife" not Valerie Plame. And he didn't tell Cooper she was a covert agent, so that means maybe he didn't know she was. And even if he did know she was covert, the CIA cannot prove they were "concealing" her identity.
So, I guess, in that case, never mind.
Nothing to see here, folks, just move along.

Place Yer Bets

So what are the chances that the border will REALLY reopen?
Personally, I think the odds are maybe 1 out of 3.
First, how likely is it that the 9th circut appeal court will want to be labelled as causing quintessential irreparable harm to Americans by allowing Canadian cattle across the border?
And second, even if the appeal court overturns this injunction, R-CALF isn't going to go away. The documents posted on their website appear to be preparing the ground to argue for a new injunction based on Canada's supposed non-compliance with some new BSE guidelines from the World Organization for Animal Health.
This Washington Post article explains the USDA's official position: Snow Expects U.S. to Allow Canadian Beef: "Both governments agree that enough safeguards are in place to resume trade. U.S. government officials expect to overturn a lower court ruling that has delayed its plans to reopen the U.S.-Canadian border to live Canadian cattle. Snow said the four-month-old court injunction preventing the border from reopening was 'ill considered' and not based on scientific facts."
But even with the recent BSE case in Texas, R-CALF argues to maintain the border closure. Their press release says: “The BSE safeguards already in place here in the U.S. are more stringent than measures any other country has ever implemented prior to having a case of BSE, including Canada,” said McDonnell. “Yet, USDA continues to seek to lower our import standards by writing a Final Rule that would allow cattle and additional beef products into the U.S. from Canada, a country that doesn’t meet the minimum internationally accepted standards for BSE prevention and control.” And R-CALF is lining up a batch of scientists to bolster their case for requiring that Canada meet an impossible standard -- to demonstrate that the future risk of BSE in our cattle is essentially zero -- before our cattle ever be allowed across the border again.
UPDATE -- And indeed, this Globe article reports that in addition to the appeal court hearing next week, R-CALF has schedule another Montana hearing for July 27 with the same Judge Cebull (a 2001 Bush appointee, by the way) who gave the last injunction.
Goodale is quoted in the Globe article as saying “We believe that with the most recent developments in the United States, the rationale behind the judgment of Judge Cebull has absolutely evaporated — there is no justification for that position.” That's gonna piss him off real good!
And the Conservative Party has been granted amicus standing and will submit a brief to this hearing, though the Canadian government was apparently refused intervenor status by Cebull. Do a good job, guys!